Earthquakes leave Brown on the edge of a precipice
'I'm absolutely sure that Britain can be the great global success story of this century," said Gordon Brown when he finally ousted Tony Blair and got into Number 10 Downing Street just two years ago this week.
The triumphalism sounded pretty hollow at the time but even Brown's strongest critics in the Commons never imagined just how quickly his pledge to "let the work of change begin" would be undermined by what he now describes, ruefully, as "two earthquakes -- one economic, unparalleled since the war -- one political, the biggest parliamentary scandal for two centuries".
The unfortunate Brown has discovered, like many ambitious people before him, that getting what you have long desired in life does not necessarily provide the satisfaction and happiness that you hoped for.
Instead, to the delight of the many Labour MPs who want to get rid of him as soon as possible, he is beginning to sound thoroughly fed up with the job that he craved since he became addicted to politics as a teenager.
In an interview that turned out to be far more revealing than he and his spin doctors intended, he said that he could "walk away from all of this" in the morning and added, quite accurately, that "it would probably be good for my children".
Brown's reputation has been hit by his disastrous handling of the planned inquiry into the invasion of Iraq.
Apparently under pressure from Tony Blair, he initially announced that this would be held in private but quickly had to backtrack as public protests mounted.
Nick Clegg, the Lib Dem leader, said that anything less than an open inquiry would "make people feel this is just a grand cover-up for, after all, what was the biggest foreign policy mistake this country has made since Suez", back in 1956.
The furore over the botched attempt to run a "freedom of disinformation" exercise intensified yesterday with the leak of new evidence suggesting that Blair knew of secret attempts by the US to provoke Iraq into attacking UN-badged reconnaissance flights over its territory in order to provide a legal pretext for another UN resolution.
In an attempt to limit the fallout from the inquiry, Brown has ordered it not to report until after the next general election.
The man in charge of it, Sir John Chilcot, used to be a senior civil servant in Belfast.
He faces a formidable task in trying to reconcile the enormous number of vested interests, both political and personal, that will be involved.
Critics are already wondering whether he has ever shown the independence of mind that will be needed to resist establishment pressures, especially as he has been forbidden from parcelling out "blame" on anyone.
His most difficult job will be to try to prevent the whole thing turning into a bonanza for lawyers like the Saville Tribunal on Bloody Sunday which was first announced by Tony Blair more than 11 years ago and is now due to report this autumn.
Blair is himself back in the news. David Cameron has upset many of his Tory colleagues by dropping hints he would not stand in the way of the former prime minister becoming the first real EU president if, as most people at Westminster expect, the Lisbon Treaty gets ratified by the end of this year.
His foreign affairs spokesman, William Hague, says bluntly: "We haven't spent 10 years opposing Tony Blair as prime minister of Britain to agree to him becoming president of the European Union."
But political cross-dressing is all the rage this summer.
In the election for the new speaker of the Commons this evening, many Conservatives are reluctantly going to support the Labour minister, Margaret Beckett, simply because they cannot stand the left-of-centre posturing of their own leading candidate, John Bercow.
Mr Bercow, on the other hand, is expecting to get votes from Labour MPs who want to embarrass the opposition.
Almost all the candidates have been tainted by the never-ending stream of revelations about their expense claims.
But none of them has reached the giddy heights, beyond parody, of George Osborne, the shadow chancellor, who put in a claim for £47 (€55) for two DVDs of a speech he had made himself on the subject of "Value for Taxpayers' Money''.
The expenses fiasco reached its climax last week when the official version of the claims was finally released with many key details simply blacked out like something from the government information service in a third world country.
"I'm not as great a presenter of information or communicator as I would like to be," said Gordon Brown last week.
Ironically, he has just appointed as his new spokesman in Downing Street a man called Simon Lewis, whose brother, Will, is the editor of the 'Daily Telegraph', the paper which bought and published the leaked data on expenses claims.
Will is not the only prominent figure with a brother in the public relations business.
Andrew Brown, a brother of the prime minister, is the spin doctor for the energy group, EDF, whose many customers for electricity include Number 10 Downing Street.
